Who is Gnasher Skeggi's father?
That's the interesting point of mythology—or theology, perhaps—that arose during our Thirteenth Night feast the other night.
Thirteenth Night (otherwise known as Feast of Fools), the feast that marks the official end of the Yuledays, is characterized by, shall we say, immoderation in eating and drinking: one final blowout before the Lean Days of Winter. We'd been singing the old songs of Mother Berhta, Old Witch Winter, the Yule ogress who (locally, anyway) brings to pagan kids, not what they want, but what they deserve, on Midwinter's Eve.
(Sometimes shown with the severed head of Santa Claus dangling from her belt, Mother B. is universally acknowledged to be One Tough Customer.)
As everyone knows, on Mother Night she comes riding in on the back of none other than Gnasher Skeggi, who—as the song says—is “her goat, her son, and boyfriend too. (Oi!)”
(“Oi!” indeed. You know those mythological characters.)
So, in the middle of the feast, someone—for the first known time in recorded Paganistani history—raised the question: If Berhta herself is Gnasher Skeggi's mother, who, then, is his father?
(“Skeggi", incidentally, is cognate with the English word shaggy—an apt enough name for a goat. As for “Gnasher”, well, he's a goat. You'll remember that “Tooth-gnasher” is one of the bucks that draws Thor's war-chariot.)
Once asked, of course, the question answers itself (this is, after all, mythology, and hence inherently paradoxical): He sires himself. Skeggi Skeggason, that's him.
So where did the First Skeggi come from? Come on, you know the answer to that one, too.
It's like what the Flat-Earther, who contended that the Earth rests on the back of a Great Turtle swimming through Space, said when asked (by Bertrand Russell, no less), What holds up the Great Turtle, then?
It's turtles all the way down.
For Prodea, of course